Law Commons^™

Law's Box: Law, Jurisprudence And The Information Ecosphere, Paul D. Callister

Paul D. Callister

For so long as it has been important to know “what the law is,” the practice of law has been an information profession. Nonetheless, just how the information ecosphere affects legal discourse and thinking has never been systematically studied. Legal scholars study how law attempts to regulate information flow, but they say little about how information limits, shapes, and provides a medium for law to operate.

Part I of the paper introduces a holistic approach to “medium theory”—the idea that methods of communication influence social development and ideology—and applies the theory to the development of legal thinking and institutions. Part …

Reflecting On The Rule Of Law, Its Reciprocal Relation With Rights, Legitimacy And Other Concepts And Institutions, Samuel J.M. Donnelly

Syracuse Journal of International Law and Commerce

When bringing social science to the study of law, understanding the role of law in the process of social change is central. The great American example of social change influenced by law begins, of course, with the end of our Civil War, the freeing of the slaves, and continues through the establishment of segregation, the attacks upon it, desegregation and the development of affirmative action. May I suggest that another very important sequence of legal and social changes is the development and recognition of human rights in the European Union since · World War 11. In the first part of …

Sacred Visions Of Law, Robert Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Around the time of the Bicentennial Celebration of the U.S. Constitution's framing, Professor Sanford Levinson called upon Americans to renew our constitutional faith. This article answers the call by examining how two legal symbols - Marbury v. Madison and Brown v. Board of Education - have been used by jurists over the years to tend the American community of faith. Blending constitutional theory and the study of religious form, the article argues that the decisions have become increasingly linked in the legal imagination even as they have come to signify very different sacred visions of law. One might think that …

Recovering The Lost Worlds Of America's Written Constitutions, Christian G. Fritz

Faculty Scholarship

Recovering the Lost Worlds of America's Written Constitutions,' originating as the sixth Brennan Lecture delivered at Oklahoma City University Law School on November 7, 2002, explores the transformation of the right of revolution in the wake of the American Revolution. The significance of displacing the singular sovereign in the person of the king with the collective sovereign of 'the people,' gave rise to constitutional understandings that are at odds with today's constitutionalism that emphasizes the necessity of procedural regularity to effect legitimate constitutional revision. The article explores how 'circumvention' of such procedures was consistent with an earlier concept of the …